Tea Party Has Been Assimilated!

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E.J. Dionne Jr.NationofChange / Op-EdPublished: Friday 20 January 2012
“What’s remarkable is that Romney seems to be closing in on a victory at the very moment when he is painting himself as the anti-populist and a tone-deaf economic elitist.”
Where Are the Republican Populists? Photo: Gage Skidmore

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SHARE Email Mem­bers of the Tea Party in­sisted they were turn­ing the GOP into a pop­ulist, anti-es­tab­lish­ment bas­tion. So­cial con­ser­v­a­tives have long ar­gued that val­ues and morals mat­ter more than money. Yet in the end, the cor­po­rate and eco­nom­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive wing of the Re­pub­li­can Party al­ways seems to win.

Thus was Mitt Rom­ney so con­fi­dent of vic­tory in Sat­ur­day’s South Car­olina pri­mary that he left the state briefly on Tues­day for a fundraiser in New York. And why not? The power of big money has been am­pli­fied in this cam­paign by the super PACs let loose by the Supreme Court’sCit­i­zens United de­ci­sion and lax reg­u­la­tion.

You can­not watch the morn­ing news shows in South Car­olina with­out con­fronting an in­tri­cately con­fus­ing blitz of ads, some paid for by can­di­dates, oth­ers by the sup­pos­edly in­de­pen­dent PACs. One kind is in­dis­tin­guish­able from the other.

The na­ture of the ads shows why it would be a major upset were Rom­ney to lose here. Al­though Rom­ney’s op­po­nents di­rect some of their fire his way, they are spend­ing a for­tune tear­ing each other apart. Rick Perry’s back­ers take on both Newt Gin­grich and Rick San­to­rum. Ron Paul as­sails Gin­grich and San­to­rum, too. Rom­ney’s sup­port­ers have piled on with ads against Gin­grich.

Gin­grich flicks aside San­to­rum and Perry with faint praise in his speeches, as he did at an event here on Tues­day night, main­tain­ing that “the only ef­fec­tive vote to stop Mitt Rom­ney is Newt Gin­grich.” And it does seem, from the polls and the buzz, thatGin­grich is the only op­tion whose mo­men­tum gives him at least an out­side chance of get­ting by Rom­ney. But San­to­rum and Perry are not giv­ing way, which is why Rom­ney could af­ford his side trip to Man­hat­tan.

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“Peo­ple have treated Rom­ney com­ing in first as a fore­gone con­clu­sion and gone for sec­ond,” said Joel Sawyer, who con­sulted for Jon Hunts­man and is now neu­tral. “I see that as a fun­da­men­tally flawed strat­egy. A very sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of Re­pub­li­cans are look­ing for an al­ter­na­tive, but what Rom­ney’s op­po­nents have done is weaken each other.”

Bob McAl­is­ter, who served as the late Re­pub­li­can gov­er­nor Car­roll Camp­bell’s chief of staff, said a Rom­ney vic­tory would be the re­sult of the con­ser­v­a­tive split, “not be­cause Rom­ney is so strong or well-liked by South Car­olini­ans.”


Photo: Gage Skid­more
The con­fu­sion was ob­vi­ous at the well-at­tended event here for Gin­grich. In­ter­viewed as they stood in line to shake hands with the can­di­date, voter after voter said they mis­trusted Rom­ney — Scott Gilmer, an en­gi­neer, saw Rom­ney as “a whole lot like Obama” — but many ex­pressed in­de­ci­sion be­tween Gin­grich and San­to­rum.

What’s re­mark­able is that Rom­ney seems to be clos­ing in on a vic­tory at the very mo­ment when he is paint­ing him­self as the anti-pop­ulist and a tone-deaf eco­nomic elit­ist. Not only did he sug­gest Tues­day that he pays a low 15 per­cent tax rate (be­cause most of his in­come de­rives from in­vest­ments); he also dis­missed the money he made from speak­ing fees as “not very much.”

It turned out that, over the year end­ing last Feb­ru­ary, speeches earned him more than $370,000. That’s not chump change for most folks.

Think about Rom­ney’s rise in light of the over­heated po­lit­i­cal analy­sis of 2010 that saw a Re­pub­li­can Party as being trans­formed by the Tea Party le­gions who, in al­liance with an over­lap­ping group of so­cial and re­li­gious con­ser­v­a­tives, would take the party away from the es­tab­lish­men­tar­i­ans. If I had a dol­lar for every time the new GOP was de­scribed in those days as “pop­ulist,” I sus­pect I’d have more than Rom­ney made from his lec­tures.

Cer­tainly some of the move­ment’s fail­ures can be at­trib­uted to a flawed set of com­peti­tors and the split on the right, es­pe­cially Paul’s abil­ity to siphon off a sig­nif­i­cant share of the Tea Party vote. That has made a con­sol­i­da­tion of its forces im­pos­si­ble. (Rom­ney may owe Paul an ap­point­ment to the Fed­eral Re­serve.)

But there is an­other pos­si­bil­ity: that the GOP never was and never can be a pop­ulist party, that the term was al­ways being mis­ap­plied, and that enough Re­pub­li­cans are quite com­fort­able with a Har­vard-ed­u­cated pri­vate-eq­uity spe­cial­ist.

“Rom­ney is as es­tab­lish­ment as they come,” said McAl­is­ter. For many con­ser­v­a­tives, he added, a fall cam­paign be­tween Rom­ney and Pres­i­dent Obama could thus be a choice be­tween “which of the two es­tab­lish­ments do you hate most.”

That’s not where the Tea Party’s pro­mot­ers said we were headed.

© , Wash­ing­ton Post Writ­ers Group
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ABOUT E.J. Dionne Jr.
E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is also a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Before joining The Post in 1990 as a political reporter, Dionne spent 14 years at the New York Times, where he covered politics and reported from Albany, Washington, Paris, Rome and Beirut. He is the author of four books: “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right” (2008), “Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge” (2004), “They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era” (1996), and “Why Americans Hate Politics” (1991), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee. Dionne grew up in Fall River, Mass., attended Harvard College and was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He lives in Bethesda, Md., with his wife and three children.